They also accuse we on the right of wholly dismissing it. (Well, I’m a buyer — so too is just about every conservative I know. But leftists never allow facts to get in the way of a good beating.)

Darwin’s theory of evolution is about wild, dynamic change — spontaneous, ceaseless disruption of the status quo. Every organism is constantly evolving to meet the demands of its environment. Which in turn changes the environment. Meanwhile, every other organism must constantly adjust to all of this.

Natural selection is the gradual process by which biological traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of the effect of inherited traits on the differential reproductive success of organisms interacting with their environment….

The term “natural selection” was popularized by Charles Darwin who intended it to be compared with artificial selection, which is now called selective breeding.

All of this sounds an awful lot like a free market economy. Species are companies — the market, the environment. Only the capitalism evolution timeline is infinitely compressed. It doesn’t take thousands of years for changes to occur — they happen instantaneously, constantly, incessantly. And the price for natural selection changes for the worse are paid just as fast — a good idea today can kill you tomorrow. “Want to buy a Tower Records, Eduardo?”

Nowhere is this spontaneous disorder on greater display than the Internet-technology sector. It’s still a very nascent industry — so new ideas are constantly being developed and introduced. In the distributed Web, competition comes at you via myriad web strands — at multiple, acute angles.

Text messaging used to make cellular phone companies a ton of coin; free text apps have now strip-mined that revenue stream. And Vonage now lets you place calls via your Vonage account — on other companies’ broadband networks. That’ll cut down on your minutes used.

Sounds like evolution on speed and steroids. The left should love it — except they don’t. When it comes to the economy, they eschew the Darwinian decentralized disorder that has created our diverse, beautiful planet — and instead demand ossified, centralized planning.

“At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”

Central planning doesn’t get more central or planned than that. And how is this anti-Darwinism applied?

“Consumer groups are outraged about a potential plan for ESPN to subsidize smartphone data usage, saying it would violate the principle of net neutrality,” a story at The Hillread recently.

Get that? Leftist “consumer groups” want the government to block an evolutionary next step — a private company making things cheaper for consumers. How is that in consumers’ interest?

If it works, all the better, for everyone. Natural selection will have others emulating them, and the downward price pressure will continue to expand. If it doesn’t, natural selection will make it go away.

But it’ll probably work. ESPN’s proposal is really just Darwin-esque copycatting of successes elsewhere. Ever heard of an 800 phone number — where a private company pays for your call to them? Or free shipping — where a private company pays to deliver you the goods you purchased from them?

Of course you have. The left, apparently, has not — or chooses to ignore this little slice of reality. No amount of economic dynamism shakes their government-centric monomania.